A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

For some users and media there may be just a touch of controversy concerning the design of our GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H motherboard, simply because we’ve opted for a red and silver finish on the heatsinks.

Red isn’t a color usually associated with GIGABYTE boards (being a color more commonly associated with one of our competitors’ offerings), but with the Z87X-UD4H we’ve opted to go with a fairly subtle red and silver finish on the heatsinks alone, maintaining our black on black color scheme that you’ll see throughout the upper mainstream 8 series range.

We’ve really put a great deal of thought into our forthcoming OC offerings, pulling out all the stops to give Overclockers an absolutely awesome OC experience. Hicookie and our engineers have been working ceaselessly for several months now, ensuring every last detail is nailed. So it’s really, really encouraging to see the OC community is so stoked about these boards.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

We just came across a very interesting article on hardware.fr which examines the RMA (Return merchandise authorization) rates of several PC component segments by vendor. Although the data seems to be restricted to only e-retail, and covers only April 1 to October 1, 2012, it still paints a very positive picture from a GIGABYTE perspective.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

We wrote an article a couple of days ago about liquid nitrogen based coolers for memory and a lot of people were wondering what it’s all about. While I can’t show the frequencies with new generation chipset, I can tell you it will be memory overclocker’s paradise platform.

Here’s what those Corsair Dominator Platinum 2666 kit looked like after I froze the kingpin RAM pot and then took it off. Tell me that isn’t stunning!

Motherboard of choice is GIGABYTE’s latest OC board coming out next month. Incidentally Corsair and Intel are running a $20,000 competition at Computex 2013 this year which will involve some insane memory freezing and world records galore. TeamAU will be there happy to oblige to freeze some things .

That’s not all btw, we will also be present at G.Skill’s Computex OC show on 7th June at Nangang Hall. I’ll see you all there if you can make it!

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

I came across a PR release from EK releasing their first LN2 cooler. This one is based on RAM and by the looks of it has had some testing done on our new generation OC motherboard. It’s nice to see people passionate about their RAM clocking! We’re working hard at the moment on numerous ICs to see how they fair subzero with an upcoming new generation boards.

An alternative to this is the well established Kingpin cooler which we’ve successfully used in GIGABYTE’s labs to do a lot of our testing. It’s a great LN2 RAM cooler!

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

We’ve reported about a forum thread a little while ago that encourages overclockers worldwide to fine tune their platform at a set frequency limit to establish who has the most performance efficient PC around. It’s done by limiting the CPU to 5GHz on Z77 Ivy Bridge platform and allowing end users to tune their memory frequency and timings and produce the fastest possible 32M SuperPi they can.

The whole point of the exercise is to improve your tweaking skills which you can then apply at maximum CPU clocks so if the current leader was to get the highest clocking CPU around, he would beat the current SuperPI world record without much trouble. What’s also possible is that he would be able to beat the world record with slightly lower CPU clocks compared to top score due to his efficiency which is even more rewarding to a tweaker. This is comparable to a 100m sprint runner and their training to improve the technique over such a short distance. The most efficient guy is Usain Bolt and even with a bad start he has the ability to catch his opponents just about every time.

Bullant (aka Usain Bullant lol) from Australia happens to be the current leader of this little tweakers competition sporting his favourite GIGABYTE Z77X-UP5TH motherboard clocking 4x sticks of PSC based IC memory modules at an astonishing 1326.4MHz at 6-10-6-28 subtimings. Memory is cooled with liquid nitrogen (Kingpin Ney RAM pot) at a freezing –105C while CPU is on single stage refrigeration cooling running at –30C. The current leader nearing the end of this platform tends to be just about unbeatable as getting that last little out of the platform gets ever so much harder knowing everyone’s had a good year to improve their Superpi results.

Congratulations mate, well done! Nice warm-up for the next generation GIGABYTE motherboards which will raise the bar a great deal higher .

Friday, May 3, 2013

If you have enjoyed our last few 8 series tempters over the last week or so, you’re really going to enjoy what we’re bringing you today. As I’m sure you can imagine, our BIOS team has been extremely busy in the last few weeks to get everything ready for our new motherboard launch, and we’re really proud of the result, not least because of its new look and feel.

Check it out. I think this redesign will really resonate with our OC fans.